Church of Santa Maria della Vittoria – This church, originally a poor Carmelite church, was slathered with Baroque richness in the 17th century. It houses Bernini’s best-known statue, the swooning St. Teresa in Ecstasy.
Inside the church, we find St. Teresa to the left of the altar. Teresa has just been stabbed with God’s arrow of fire. Now, the angel pulls it out and watches her reaction. Teresa swoons, her eyes roll up, her hand goes limp, she parts her lips… and moans. The smiling, cherubic angel understands just how she feels. Teresa, a 16th-century Spanish nun, later talked of the “sweetness” of “this intense pain,” describing her oneness with God in ecstatic, even erotic, terms.
Bernini, the master of multimedia, pulls out all the stops to make this mystical vision real. Actual sunlight pours through the alabaster windows, and bronze sunbeams shine on a marble angel holding a golden arrow. Teresa leans back on a cloud and her robe ripples from within, charged with her spiritual arousal. Bernini has created a little stage-setting of heaven. And watching from the “theater boxes” on either side are members of the family who commissioned the work.
Baths of Dioclestian/ Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli – Of all the marvelous structures built by the Romans, their public baths were arguably the grandest, and the Baths of Diocletian were the granddaddy of them all. Built by Emperor Diocletian around AD 300 and sprawling over 30 acres – roughly five times the size of the Colosseum – these baths could cleanse 3,000 Romans at once. They functioned until AD 537, when barbarians attacked and the city’s aqueducts fell into disuse, plunging Rome into a thousand years of poverty, darkness, and BO. Today, we can visit one grand section of the baths, the former main hall. This impressive remnant of the ancient complex was later transformed (with help from Michelangelo) into the Church of Santa Maria degli Angeli.
